Abstract

Evolution of smart cities induces critical challenges related to cyber and network security. The increased reliance of a smart city on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure improves automation, efficiency, and sustainability of city services. However, it also poses enormous challenges for ensuring continued operations and services at all times and especially under cyber-attacks. Any lapse in cyber security can lead to critical disaster across the city. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are considered to be the most predominant and prevalent cyber-attacks. A smart city could consist of numerous applications with varying level of network and security requirements. Providing an adaptive mechanism against DDoS attacks for all applications in a smart city is a key challenge. Further, considering the wide-scale requirements of a smart city, developing an adaptive and flexible solution is a key requirement. This research presents SEAL (SEcure and AgiLe) – a novel Software Defined Networking (SDN) based adaptive framework for protecting smart city applications against DDoS attacks. The SEAL framework leverages key characteristics of SDN such as the global visibility, centralized control, and programmability to enhance the security and resilience. SEAL is capable of effectively detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks not only on application servers but also on network resources. SEAL is also unique in this regard that it provides application specific DDoS attack security solution instead of static threshold mechanism.

About Ms. Narmeen Zakaria Bawany

Narmeen Zakaria Bawany is pursuing her PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jawwad Ahmed Shamsi from Computer Science department, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan. She is an Associate Professor at department of Computer Science and IT, Jinnah University for Women. She has over 15 years of teaching experience at graduate and under graduate level. She has supervised many under graduate projects and had also received funding from ICT R&D for her projects. Her research areas include Software Defined Networking, Cybersecurity, Semantic Web, and Human Computer Interaction.

About Dr. Jawwad Ahmed Shamsi

Dr. Jawwad Ahmed Shamsi is currently a Professor at Department of Computer Science, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Karachi. He has completed his PhD. in Computer Science from Wayne State University, MI, USA in August 2009 under the supervision of Monica Brockmeyer. He has published more than 50 research papers in Journals and Conferences of international repute.His research has been funded by NVIDIA Research Center and HEC NRPU grants. He is an HEC-approved Ph.D. supervisor. His research interest lies in Distributed Systems, Networks Security, Software Defined Networking, and High Performance Computing.